Tesla
TSLA, -0.44%
late Wednesday reported an adjusted net loss of $45 million, or 36 cents a share, which compared with adjusted earnings of 12 cents a share a year ago. Tesla’s adjusted revenues hit $1.1 billion. Analysts polled by FactSet had expected a loss of 50 cents a share on sales of $1.04 billion.

The company said it’s on track to deliver 55,000 cars in 2015, although it raised eyebrows by saying it expected to deliver 10,000 to 11,000 cars in the second quarter, 1,000 to 2,000 fewer cars than Wall Street had forecast.

Here are four takeaways from Tesla’s fourth-quarter earnings:

Batteries, batteries, and did we mention batteries?

Talk about Tesla’s new home and commercial stationary batteries, launched last month, dominated the conference call with analysts following results. Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk reserved some of his most colorful remarks to talk about demand for the new batteries, at one point calling it “crazy off the hook.”

“So, I mean, there is, like, no way that we could possibly satisfy this demand this year and we’re basically like sold out through the middle of next year in the first week. It was just crazy. We had 2,500 requests from companies that want to distribute and install the Powerwall and Powerpack. We can’t even respond to them. We have to, like, triage our response to those who want to be a distributor,” he said on the call, according to a transcript by FactSet.

The batteries initially are being produced at Tesla’s factory in Fremont, Calif., but once Tesla gets its battery plant up and running, production will shift to the ‘gigafactory’ and will ramp up, with Tesla realizing economies of scale, Musk said. Tesla is building the gigafactory outside Reno, Nev. The factory is going to churn out the stationary batteries “as fast as we can,” Musk said.

Making battery packs for cars, however, will still be Tesla’s priority, he said.

Spending

Tesla kept its 2015 expense budget intact at $1.5 billion.

Tesla is spending money to expand and launch a new car, the Model X SUV. The company is also investing in a new paint shop, to be ready in the summer, which Chief Financial Officer Deepak Ahuja called “a very significant investment.”

“And then, we’ve also had investments in the gigafactory and our sales and service network. That’s probably the order in which we’ve been spending,” Ahuja said.

The Model X is on target for deliveries

Tesla is making sure it gets everything about the Model X right—particularly some of its more eye-popping characteristics, like the falcon-wing doors (which have two hinges to better negotiate tighter spaces),

On the call, Musk gushed over the Model X. “I just drove the latest prototype today and it’s, like, wow. But this is by far the best SUV” on the road, he said. It handles like a sports car even though it’s an SUV, he added.

Tesla wants to “iron everything out and make sure it’s good (with the Model X) and then deliver at high volume,” because Tesla is going to go from a small number of cars “to like 1,000 a week pretty fast,” Musk said.

Customers will be able to pre-configure their Model X on Tesla’s website likely in early July.

Model 3 also on track

Tesla has not yet spent the big bucks on its planned Model 3, the mass-market electric car it hopes to have lined up in the next couple of years.

The company is doing “quite a bit of advance work” on the car, expected to cost between $35,000 and $40,000—roughly half the starting cost of a Model S—but it doesn’t amount to a lot of capital expenditure yet because Tesla is still building the early engineering prototypes for the car, as to be expected at this point in time.

Tesla is hoping to show off a Model 3 prototype in March. The car will be in production around late 2017, Tesla said.

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